


Sleep Awake

by bluemoodblue



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (no one dies it’s cool it’s good), Bittersweet, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Lots of dreaming, Other, PUBLISHING FAST BEFORE THE EP DROPS TOMORROW, Psychic Abilities, Season 3 speculation fic, alien medicine, alien psychic powers, description of injury, description of serious medical situation, unexpected cmp side effects
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28564851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoodblue/pseuds/bluemoodblue
Summary: The push is just as gentle as it was before, her hold is laughably weak, and Juno still can’t break it. He’s too tired in seconds, and it’s a grim reminder of why they’re here. He eases back into the bed, and when he looks up at her again, the fear he’s trying to push under something else - anything else - is still shining through. “What happened?”“It’s your blood.”Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Sometimes, there are no other options.
Relationships: Aurinko Crime Family & Juno Steel, Juno Steel & Sasha Wire, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Vespa Ilkay & Juno Steel
Comments: 17
Kudos: 133





	Sleep Awake

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot tell you the journey I have gone on to write this fic. I was about to hang it up as a loss, and then the episode dropped and I decided, I gotta finish. Tumblr didn’t like how long it was. And now here we are, hours before these ideas are thrown out. But still, we are here!
> 
> All credit goes to questbedhead on tumblr, who graciously allowed me to borrow some theories! This fic would not exist otherwise! Thank you!
> 
> (Also, please mind the tags! There’s nothing particularly graphic, but there’s lots of talk of injury and illness and potential, looming death. Not actual death, tho, I would’ve warned you)

It could be depression, Juno considers.

He’s been carted from the medbay back to his room and left there like so many spare parts in storage. The blaster shot hadn’t caused any permanent damage, but he still feels it - the odd twinge of phantom pain, the idea of it making him brush the spot again and again as if something’s changed there. There’s nothing there, no scar or mark, and Juno still feels so goddamn tired.

He could blame it on Sasha. He could blame it on really effective Dark Matters pain meds. He could blame it on a lot of things, not the least of which being alone and unsure. 

Whatever it is, Juno’s having a really hard time getting out of bed for anything, these days.

He tries not to let himself backslide too far. He tries to keep his mind busy thinking of ways to get all of them out of this, reminds himself that there are people only walls away trying to do the same. They’re out there, even when he feels so alone that it aches. Juno taps the wall behind him in collections of patterns that he and Ben learned years ago - messages just in case someone else happens to know outdated navigation codes. Just in case someone is listening. 

More than anything else, Juno makes the conscious, repeated effort to trust - to trust the others, to trust himself, to trust that there’s an end to this and maybe it’ll even be better than where he is now.

To trust Peter Nureyev.

Maybe this is just who Juno Steel is on his own, Juno considers. The kind of person who has to work so hard to have faith that he’s exhausted himself. He doesn’t let the thought linger.

Juno can tell Sasha is annoyed when she shows up at his door to bring him to the improvised interrogation room and he yawns in her face. He can count on one hand how many times he’s gotten a reaction from her for anything, and he lets himself feel smug about it for the short walk to the closet of a room that Sasha had cleared out for her purposes. He doesn’t have much going for him - he’ll take the victories where he can find them.

The interrogations are nothing. There’s just nothing of substance for Juno to latch onto, and if he didn’t know she was prepared to shoot him at the slightest provocation, he might wonder if the script is to keep him in the dark. She asks her questions. Juno asks his. Neither of them answer with anything useful. And thus the interaction circles pointlessly, and Juno misses his bed.

They’re not expecting anyone on the Carte Blanche to give them much, Juno picks up after a few rounds of the farce. Or they’re wearing them down with boredom, its own kind of torture. Or, he thinks to himself as he’s led in the room with an extra person sitting in the corner - an extra person holding an electric baton - they just have all the time they need to escalate this at whatever pace they want.

Juno doesn’t ask; he won’t get an answer, and it would be just his luck that a zap of electricity is Sasha’s new method for getting him to shut up faster. He sits heavily in the chair closest to the door, and his handcuffs, two metal bracelets connected by their own electric charge and glowing faintly, clink lightly against the table. There are a few flecks of glitter by his right hand. He knows who left that there, and the smile that flits across his face is unavoidable.

“Apologies for interrupting your nap.” Her tone is sharp, demanding attention. Juno’s smile drops, which was probably her intent. “I hope you’ll be able to focus on the matter at hand.”

“I should be okay, but thanks for checking in,” Juno mutters, wondering how much it would annoy her if he yawned right now and how likely it was to earn him a zap. He decides against it - just not feeling it. “I guess your friend over there will make sure I stay awake?”

Sasha doesn’t even glance behind her as she takes her own seat. The man with the baton could press his advantage and shock her from behind if he felt so inclined, but he doesn’t move, maybe doesn’t even breathe. He might be a robot, actually - Sasha seems to like robotic, unquestioning help, and Dark Matters is eerily good at making them seem lifelike. Mostly. “If you cooperate, our guest shouldn’t be an issue. He’s only here for… motivation.”

Something about that makes Juno frown. It doesn’t feel right. Motivation implies the crew has been holding back - and sure, Juno would bet good creds that the crew has been giving as little as possible - but if their questions had been anything like his, Sasha hasn’t been asking for much. It’s escalation without any apparent urgency, and it feels manufactured.

Juno wants to follow that thread and see where it takes him, if he could unravel some part of what’s going on - but he’s so _damn_ tired. “Fantastic. Really looks like the cheerleading _type_ , you know?”

She ignores him. “This shouldn’t take long, Mr. Steel, and then we can both get back to our lives.” He hates that. He _hates_ the way she pretends they don’t know each other. “We have reason to suspect there is an unknown entity aboard this ship.”

Juno doesn’t flinch, or look away from Sasha. He tries not to react at all, and maybe he manages it; he can’t tell, and her face isn’t giving it away. Unknown entity. He hasn’t heard Nureyev’s voice - or heard a whisper of the name “Peter Ransom” - since before the blaster was fired. “Sounds a little spooky. Maybe it’s some kind of high-tech robot, the kind that can shapeshift once it gets someone’s dna. I hear they make those now.”

“Technology is a marvel,” she says with no emotion, and adds, “But I’m pretty sure we both know who hasn’t been accounted for.”

Juno is stubbornly silent. Sasha sighs.

“Agent M-17, cease recording audio.” The agent in the corner nods, but doesn’t seem to do anything else. Sasha doesn’t turn around to check - her focus is all on him. “This is idiotic even for you, Juno.”

It’s her. For a moment she slips, and it’s _Sasha_ , and all Juno wants to do is relax in the presence of someone he’s trusted for years. It aches that he can’t.

It aches in right about the spot where she shot him.

“Hey, Sash.” It comes out a little weak.

“Are you listening to me at all? You’re not doing him any favors pretending he doesn’t exist - I introduced you, I saw the footage Agent G collected, I already know he’s here. You’re not _saving_ anyone by being stubborn.”

It’s all so ridiculously, irritatingly pointless. Why is she wasting their time - hell, why is she wasting her _own?_ It isn’t like Sasha Wire to spin her wheels uselessly. “So then why drag me all the way over here and sit me in front of a guy with a baton? What do you want out of this?”

“I want you to give me _something, Juno_.” There might be years and miles between them, but her face looks just the same as it did when she would yell at him and Mick for some stupid stunt they pulled in high school. “Anything that I can hold up and say, ‘he’s not a criminal, just criminally stupid, your honor.’ This isn’t you. I know you better than that.”

“Sasha…”

“I am trying to help you. Why won’t you let me?”

Juno thinks he might even believe that she thinks so. But she’s not here for Juno - they’re sitting across an interrogation table from each other because Juno is in her way. “You’re not trying to help me. I don’t know what this is about, Sasha, but it’s not about _me_ \- what are you looking for, and why is someone as good at her job as you are dragging her feet to find it?”

Her mouth snaps shut. Juno can’t follow the emotions that flick across her face, he just knows that there are a lot of them, rapidly flying by as she processes them. And then she’s gone again, and it _hurts_. “If you want to throw yourself on swords for people who don’t deserve it, then go ahead. I’ve had enough.”

“Sasha, listen to me, they’re better than you’re giving them credit for -”

“Agent M-17, continue recording audio.”

“This doesn’t… I know something’s wrong, you can _talk_ to me -”

“How many people are on this ship, Mr. Steel?”

It’s already too late; they’re back where they started, and this new Sasha would never show weakness where it could be recorded and used against her. Juno is so tired of being alone, though, so tired of watching people drop away from him, and he feels like he has to try. “Sasha, just _tell me what it is_. What are you really after?”

Sasha doesn’t give any indication that she’s heard him. She holds up a hand and flicks a couple of fingers in an unspoken order to the agent sitting in the corner of the room, and Juno hears the buzz of electricity even before he steps around her into view. Juno knows what it’s going to feel like - everyone who was in the Hyperion City Police Academy would know what one of those batons felt like, since you couldn’t graduate without getting tapped by one. Sasha is going easy on him; he’s sure Dark Matters has better tools for this kind of interrogation. It’s showy, though, looks good on film, and again Juno thinks - _manufactured_.

The agent taps him on the shoulder, and a bolt of electricity jolts him in his chair. He shifts without meaning to, feels his hands clench and his jaw set without his permission until it passes. It passes quickly, and he’s fine. He’s… fine.

“How many people are on this _ship_ , Mr. Steel.”

He chokes around another attempt to reach her. “Six, including you.”

Another tap, another clench of his whole body, and Juno isn’t breathing as easy as he was a second ago. He’s not used to this anymore; there’s an uneasy feeling coiling out from his gut about it, though he’s not sure why. Used to it or not, the batons are relatively harmless. It’s not even set to a strong charge.

“List the names of everyone aboard the ship.”

“Forgot already? That’s not very polite, especially since you’re the ones paying us a -”

The agent doesn’t wait for him to stop talking, and Juno almost bites his tongue. Where an irritated quip about hostage mistreatment should have been, there’s only an abrupt sense of _dread_. Something is wrong. Juno knows something is wrong, his whole body tells him, and he can’t place it. He’s breathing heavy, and it could be because it’s getting harder to or just because the panic is squeezing his chest. There’s a bone-deep ache settling in, and he isn’t sure it hasn’t been there for days already.

Sasha asks him something. Juno clutches the table and has the nonsensical thought that he should run, followed immediately by wondering where the hell he thought he could go. The dread hammers away at the inside of his head.

Another tap. The ache flares into something white-hot and immediate. There’s something close making a _godawful_ noise, like it’s being dragged out from the bottom of its lungs, and Juno’s throat hurts - and hell, _hell_ , that’s _him_. The sound echoes in his head, and when Sasha leans close - Sasha, the one he knows - he can only take in pieces of her at a time: her grip on his shoulders, a steely eye, her mouth moving.

Juno wants to tell her something’s wrong. It seems like the only thought that can stay in his head. He reaches out, slowly, like his arm is rusty with disuse. Her hand is gone before he finds it, and so is she in a flurry of footsteps. He’s alone.

He lurches dizzyingly to the side, and the whole ship tilts with him. Juno is on the floor, staring at the feet of the manufactured Dark Matters agent, unsure how he got there and whether he cares. The ache is so heavy it might drag him through the metal underneath him and father still, and he’s _so fucking tired_ , and his body spasms and writhes with pain that feels more distant than it did a second ago. Or maybe Juno is more distant, slipped through the hidden places of the ship where they won’t find him.

“What did you _do_ to him.” Juno knows the voice at the door. It hasn’t always been kind, but it’s always been honest. He feels every jolt of the floor as she steps closer to him, and when he reaches out again she takes his hand. “Goddammit, what the fuck did you _do?_ ” The words are furious, but the hands - feeling his pulse, feeling his head, testing his muscles - are quick and gentle.

Vespa, his mind supplies, and for the first time in so many days, Juno feels less alone. He can trust Vespa.

As if given permission, the pieces of the world around him fall asleep. The cold floor is gone. The hands are gone. The voices are gone.

Juno is gone, too.

* * *

She leaves the room for five minutes, to make sure the blood sample Dark Matters insisted on is adequately tampered with, and Juno is awake when she gets back. Vespa should have known; even pumped full of pain medication, he’s too stubborn to stay down for long.

He’s not awake much, though. He blinks up at her, barely moving on the bed, and he looks _rough_. Pale and drawn and in pain, and that’s not changing no matter what fancy drugs they put in him. For just a second Vespa thinks about how he looked at the wedding - dressed nice, making gooey eyes at Ransom until the ceremony started, and then doing his best not to cry. Happy, she settles on. He’d looked happy.

Vespa drops down into the seat next to him. “Can’t go one goddamned day without making a scene, can you, Steel.” She means to bite it out, the way they usually talk to each other, but it doesn’t have any teeth. One side of his mouth quirks up in a smile, and she’d admire that tenacity if she was a little less wrung-dry by the past several hours.

“Where…” Barely a whisper, but she’s close enough to catch it anyway.

“Dark Matters ship, in their medical wing. Your bestie insisted.” Director W insisted on a lot of things, after the screaming started. Vespa went along with it, because like hell were they taking her patient off-ship in a medical emergency without her.

Juno tries to sit up. He doesn’t even come close, but Vespa gently pushes him back down anyway.

“Don’t know where you think you’re going. You’re in that bed until I say otherwise.” They stare each other down for a moment, and Juno starts trying to move again. “Goddammit, Steel, I’m not asking! Lay _down!_ ”

The push is just as gentle as it was before, her hold is laughably weak, and Juno still can’t break it. He’s too tired in seconds, and it’s a grim reminder of why they’re here. He eases back into the bed, and when he looks up at her again, the fear he’s trying to push under something else - anything else - is still shining through. “What happened?”

“It’s your blood.”

It wasn’t supposed to be a secret; not for long at least. Just until the heist was done. Just so that Buddy wouldn’t point to it as a reason he couldn’t go, so the last year of work and preparation weren’t for nothing. Vespa couldn’t pretend she didn’t know the feeling. Right after the heist, she’d relented.

But then there was the decision of who to tell first - Buddy or Rita or Ransom - and then there was the wedding, and while they hadn’t talked about it again, Vespa was pretty sure her and Juno were on the same page: as soon as possible, once things settle down again.

Pretty big assumption, in hindsight.

They’re the only ones who know. Dark Matters won’t be finding alien gunk - or anything else - in their useless sample, and there’s no way to tell anyone on the Carte Blanche even if they were on the Carte Blanche. The decision about what comes next falls to the two of them, and just the two of them.

That’s usually how it goes between a doctor and a patient, Vespa knows. But they could both sure as hell use more people to lean on.

There’s a chuckle, raspy and weak, and then another. “Can’t catch a damn break.” Vespa likes to think she knows some of Juno’s tells by now, and that smile is too big - it stretches out like a grimace, trying to cover up whatever’s rising to the surface that he doesn’t want her to see. He looks at her; the shield is so thin, and he spits out his next words like he’s just trying to get rid of them. “How bad is it?”

“They dragged you to a Dark Matters ship because our medbay wouldn’t cut it, if that tells you anything.” She sounds angry, and she is, but that isn’t fair. She’s trying to be fair. “Your body’s rejecting your blood.”

“Oh.” The defensive protection around Juno has dropped away, but it doesn’t matter - whatever he was feeling has already atrophied, shoved away for something so much bigger. “Is that all?” His voice breaks a little in the middle.

“Been feeling kinda worn out lately?” Juno nods, and Vespa sighs. “Yeah. I think that blaster hit started this - reacted with something, changed something, just long enough that your body noticed there was stuff in you that shouldn’t be there.”

“I’ve been hit with blasters before this -”

“At close range? With something DM-issue?” She shrugs. “But who knows - maybe you’re right. Maybe you’ve been sitting on a bomb and this was always going to happen. Amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

Juno smiles - a small, exhausted expression. “What do we have to do to fix it?”

Vespa can’t hold that look for very long; her focus shifts to the rest of the room, familiar in that vague way a place can get when a person spends a lot of time and a lot of stress there. They’re not hurting for medical equipment, that’s for sure - Dark Matters can afford the kind of tech in all areas that the public, and even some of the wealthy, can only dream of. They were damn right about Juno needing care here, and where did that get them?

“Vespa?” Her silence only gives him time to ask more questions. “I know you didn’t want to mess with it before, but if the blood gunk is what’s doing this…?”

All of this goddamn medical equipment, and they might as well be on the Carte Blanche. Hell, might as well have just held his hand and watched him struggle on the floor while his body tore itself apart, for all the good she’s doing him now. Juno will be there again, maybe in an hour, maybe in a week, and Vespa… Vespa will do everything she can.

“Vespa?”

Amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?

“I don’t know how to fix this.” She says the thing she’s been trying not to think about since she paced the stretcher, since she and a handful of strangers attempted to mitigate the damage, since she saw the results of that first blood sample back when all of this started. It’s not a relief. It feels like an accusation, pointing directly back at her.

_You’re the doctor_ , Steel bites out, desperation making his words harsher. _Isn’t that your whole thing? Why are you even here if you can’t help me?_

But no - that isn’t him. When Vespa looks up, Juno isn’t even looking at her; his eyes are closed. She watches, tense, until they open again. There’s a storm building there, and Juno does what he always does when confronted with something big and dangerous: he questions it.

“Can’t you just… take the gunk out?”

“It’s not what I thought - it’s not pieces of an organ you used to have. It’s something that you’re making as part of your blood, probably to support the organ you don’t have anymore.”

Juno looks skeptical. “So I’m fighting something I’m also making? That -”

“Means you’re as stubborn on the inside as you are on the outside? Yeah, picked up on that already, Steel.”

“That doesn’t make _sense_.” She could strangle him, and it’s a weird mix of annoyance and reassurance in her gut that some things never change. “It’s stupid, bodies shouldn’t work like that.”

“I’ll tell the rest of the human race you said so,” Vespa huffs. “Besides, it’s not the human in you that’s the problem. You realize that, right?”

“So take the Martian out! Or, get my blood to stop making it, whatever,” he backtracks before she can correct him. “Wouldn’t that fix it?”

“Setting aside your _truly impressive_ grasp of how medicine works - you think I didn’t think about that?” It’s all she’s been able to think about for hours, round and round. “You’ve been fine for _years_ with that in you, Steel - if the rest of your system developed a reliance on whatever-it-is, what then? Assuming I can take it out, assuming we’ve got that kind of time, and it fucks you up in a new way? I can’t put it back in.”

It takes Juno too long to ask another question. Vespa catches her mistake just an instant before he points it out. “What kind of time are we talking about?”

“I don’t know if the blaster did anything, but that baton did,” she says instead of answering. “Lit that stuff in your blood up like a goddamn lighthouse; your immune system couldn’t ignore it.”

“How much time do I have, Vespa?”

“When I got to you, it was tearing your blood apart.” It had taken blood replication, and so many transfusions - and a lot of reckless hope - to make it stop. Vespa had no idea how much pain or what kind would remind Juno’s body that it had a threat to fight off. Maybe the next blaster shot. Maybe a stray sting of static electricity. Maybe it’ll just _happen_ , making dinner or watching a movie and then -

_Just say it_.

“You don’t,” Vespa answers in the silence. She looks him in the eye while she does. “This is killing you. More slowly now than a few hours ago, but - it’s not going to stop.”

She couldn’t have gutted him more completely if she’d slid a knife in his stomach. Juno tries to hide it. Vespa watches while he pulls up any other emotion to cover his face - anger, or sarcasm, even what seems like a strangled attempt at humor - and she thinks about jokes and barbed whining while he’s bleeding out in the medbay after a mission. It isn’t working this time.

“Just cry, Steel,” she bites out, grabbing for his hand. Vespa’s voice is maybe not as steady as she’d like it to be, but does it matter? This is death, and death is not graceful or beautiful or kind. They don’t need to meet it with dignity when it comes knocking early. “It fucking sucks and you’re allowed. You can cry about it.”

“I don’t -” It’s a rasp more than words, and it’s as far as he gets because the tears are already falling. He holds on tight, and she does, too, and if her face is wet who’s there to say anything? No one. It’s just them.

The last time she’d seen him was at the wedding, and her mind draws comparisons almost without her permission. She can practically map all the ways the blood and its complications have changed him already, the places where the hurt and exhaustion culminate. In her mind’s eye, she can put it all back the way it was, until Juno looks…

And Vespa hauls herself out of the memory, because she’s dangerously close to solidifying that image in her mind, dangerously close to that fallacy of _wouldn’t you rather remember him the way he was_ offered to family at closed caskets. Vespa is a doctor, and she does not have the questionable luxury of looking away - she wouldn’t if she did, because the ungraceful and afraid Juno Steel holding her hand right now deserves to be remembered.

There are times when Vespa thinks Buddy might be right about her and Juno being cut from the same cloth, because in the next breath he’s saying, bleakly, “I’m not done yet.” And then, angrier, “Do you hear me, Vespa, I’m _not done yet_. It can’t end like this, I’m not. I’m not gonna let it end like this.”

She scowls at him - because yeah, Steel, walk up to death and say _I’m not done yet_ and see how far that gets you, for fuck’s sake - but she can’t lie to herself: this is what she was hoping for. If this is going to work, it’s going to work for the headstrong, dumbass detective who can’t leave well enough alone. “Then you’ve got one more option, Steel, and in the interest of medical transparency I have to tell you it’s not as much a solution as it is trading in your problem for a different one.”

“Do I sound picky right now?” He sounds hoarse, and tired. He sounds just shy of desperate. He sounds, frankly, like he’ll do whatever Vespa says.

“You could still die.”

“I’m already dying.”

“It could do something worse.”

Somehow, his hand is still in hers. Vespa only realizes that she hasn’t let go yet when he squeezes, light and quick in what might be reflex instead of a genuine search for comfort. “Then I’ll pay what I have to if it means staying a little longer.”

She can’t pretend she doesn’t know how that feels.

* * *

Vespa lets him sleep.

Juno’s out the minute his head hits the pillow in the Carte Blanche medbay. He doesn’t know what she had to sell or gamble to make that deal - hard enough to keep his eyes open until she gets back, through the short walk home, while she sets up equipment - but no one stops their awkward, lurching progress between ships. Whatever muttered thanks he gives is lost in a jumble of mismatched syllables, and Juno sleeps right through the first test of the Curemother Prime without a word of complaint from her. 

That might be the worst part. She’s not handling him gently - he’s pretty sure they both know he’d break if she tried - but she’s not snapping at him, either, and that means he needs the rest. He needs the rest, and he’s afraid to sleep, because every time he closes his eyes now he thinks about not waking up again. Then he’s waking up because of course he slept without realizing, and Vespa is telling him to calm down in a voice that’s too damn understanding - and Juno doesn’t want to ask if it’s working.

Vespa either knows him too well, or it’s written all over his face. “No way to know for sure, Steel,” she mutters as she fills a syringe with something. “You’re stable, looks like. So there’s that.”

No promises - Vespa wouldn’t make a promise she couldn’t keep about his health even to make him feel better, and that’s the only thing that makes him feel better. He’s going to see it coming if it happens. 

Assuming he’s even awake.

When Juno isn’t sleeping, he’s restless. Pacing is only prevented by Vespa threatening to cuff him to the bed - a threat he is fully confident in her ability to make good on - and the possibility of listening ears makes both of them reluctant to talk about anything important. Juno spends a lot of time in his own head. He feels like he’s wearing down tracks in his thoughts, falling into ruts. Maybe he’s actually wearing something away; headaches set in eventually, aching migraines that start small and flare into something heavy and hard to one side of the inside of his head, a warning that he’s pushing himself too far. And he gives in, and he sleeps.

Juno wakes up. Vespa is searching the medbay, the whole medbay, with a steady and methodical determination. He watches her progress and wonders what she’s looking for, but before he can ask she looks over her shoulder and scowls him into silence.

Juno wakes up. He can hear clicking that he can’t find, can feel something in his hands that he can’t see. There are footsteps by the door and something is slipped into his sleeve. When he looks down, there are no sleeves and nothing to hide.

Juno wakes up. The room is dark; someone is whispering. _Nureyev_ is whispering.

_You’re only making him worse_ , Juno hears, and he can’t place where the voice is coming from; it feels like it’s so close, but the room is still and quiet. _Experimental medication, Vespa - really? You’ll kill him. You’ll kill him, because you couldn’t give a more able medical professional the chance to -_

“Hey.” Juno’s voice rings from the walls; it’s louder than he expected, louder than Nureyev, and Vespa startles next to him. “Don’t be mean. We’re out of options and I agreed to this, leave her alone.”

No one answers. Vespa is staring.

Juno wakes up. His body is stiff, dizzy nausea radiating out from the side of his head. When Vespa sees his eyes open she asks him what hurts, but he can’t talk - can’t even remember how to shape his mouth around the words, the function of his vocal chords. He reaches, hopes he’s found her when he touches something - hopes it isn’t wasted effort - and taps out “h-e-a-d.”

She’s still for a moment. Juno is sure she doesn’t understand. And then she says: “You just live to make my life complicated, don’t you? Keep your breathing steady, Steel, and focus on my voice.”

Juno wakes up. Or maybe he’s dreaming, because he thinks he’s standing and he thinks he’s looking at the Ruby 7. There’s a thought in his head, that no one is watching - that he could leave.

No, of course he can’t leave. Not after the screaming. He can’t leave.

_What screaming_ , Juno wonders, and there’s the memory of the sound echoing down the hall - it sounds like…

Juno wakes up. A deep voice hums a melody, and Juno’s chest rumbles with it.

Juno wakes up. There’s a song stuck in his head, and he doesn’t remember where he’s heard it before. Maybe Benten danced to it, because it feels like home in a way he can’t place and hasn’t felt in such a long time. Vespa catches him humming and pretends to be annoyed.

Juno wakes up. His head feels so heavy. He’s so tired.

“Steel?” Vespa’s voice brings him back to the room and the moment, grounds him in a place that feels real. “Steel, you okay?”

There it is again, that understanding. It doesn’t sound right, coming from her, and Juno just wants her to snap at him again so he doesn’t have to ask her the same thing. “Fine.” It’s not convincing. Vespa doesn’t look convinced, but she doesn’t press.

Juno tries to think of a way out. His head hurts.

* * *

Juno wakes up. The medbay is dark. His face is wet.

The wet leaks onto the pillow next to him, a dark stain on white cloth. Juno wipes some of it from his cheek; his hand comes away red, and he stares for a moment, not comprehending. He must be dreaming. He’s dreaming of the tomb, of the torture - just an old ghost come back to haunt him. That was the last time he bled like this.

He tries to wipe the rest of it away, tries to make the dream fade like it’s supposed to now that he’s awake, and Juno’s face feels bruised. Something where his eye should have been - no, a little farther back - throbs in his head. It promises that he will hurt very, _very_ soon. 

His hand stills.

“Vespa?” No answer, and no wonder when Juno can barely hear himself. “ _Vespa_ , I think something’s -”

The next throb pulls his head back down to the pillow. The pain is there, somewhere, like an alarm pulled somewhere else in the building - bound to fuck him over eventually but not quite there yet. He might be dying, he realizes. He might be.

He can’t stop it either way, and the next throb of his head slams him out of himself.

* * *

Juno wakes up. His throat is raw. Vespa is staring at him like he’s a wounded animal that might lash out at her if she gives him the opening.

There is… a lot of blood on her.

An insistent piece of memory tugs on the edge of Juno’s consciousness, and he reaches up for his face; his hand comes away clean, but there’s a bandage where his eyepatch used to be.

“Are you gonna start screaming again,” she rasps before he can ask anything.

“...no?” It hurts to say.

Some of the tension in her falls away; she doesn’t look less wary, but she does look less like she’s going to have to reach out and stop a dam leaking with her bare hands in the next few seconds. “Okay,” she says, and her voice is low enough that Juno isn’t sure if she’s talking to him or not. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s done.”

“Maybe?” He touches his face again, the edge of the bandage. He feels more awake than he has since - he’s not sure how long. He’s lost time, and he’s lost it so absolutely that he can’t even look back and track it. If something changed, most of it happened without Juno there. “What did it do?”

Vespa doesn’t snap at him that she doesn’t _know_ , hasn’t he been paying attention. She doesn’t launch into a complex explanation of medical terms he has no hope of understanding. She tells him, “You get five minutes, and then that bandage goes back on. Understand?”

Juno doesn’t, but he isn’t questioning it now. He nods, and Vespa leans in close to remove the tape.

“If anything hurts when this comes off, _tell me_.” Juno doesn’t say that she’d probably know when he started screaming in her face; he feels like that probably goes without saying between them now. He’s too tense to say anything. He just nods again, and he thinks it says something about how tense Vespa is too that she doesn’t make a crack about his sudden silence.

They barely move while Vespa peels the tape away. They barely breathe when she removes the gauze and Juno delicately reaches up to touch the place where an empty socket should be. It’s not empty anymore.

Juno opens both eyes.

“I can’t see.”

“What, at all?”

“No, just -” Just that there’s something in his eye socket, but his vision hasn’t changed. The last-ditch effort to save his life had grown something that didn’t seem to work, and it’s not a - it’s not a great sign. There’s a lurch in his gut, and Juno has to ask: “Is it an eye?”

Vespa doesn’t ask him what he’s talking about, she doesn’t even look like she’s going to tell him he’s being stupid. She looks like she’s waiting for him to catch up, because she already knows what she’s already seen.

“This thing in my _head_. Does it look like an eye, because I can’t see out of it, and if I’ve got some kind of _growth_ or _alien bullshit_ or something now I’ll...” Juno doesn’t know where he’s going with the thought, and he stops. He’s on the right side of _alive_ \- what is he so scared of now?

Vespa hands him a hand mirror. 

“No blood replicators, but we’re all set if we need to freshen up the eyeliner.” It’s a poor attempt at humor, and not even an attempt - it’s one of those things that just falls out of his mouth without passing by his brain for approval, and if he was just a little less distracted he would have been backtracking already. Instead, Juno takes the mirror.

It looks like an eye. Juno holds the mirror close. It looks like…

There’s a flicker of memory at the back of his head. Juno wasn’t a bookish kid, but there’d been a time when an illustrated book of ancient Earth wildlife had been all he and Benten had been interested in. They’d marvelled over those pages for hours, picking out half-remembered names from the equally ancient stories Sarah sometimes told them before bed. One of the more beautiful pictures had been a two-page spread of a moth, its wings depicted in careful, enlarged detail. On each wing was a ring of gold surrounding black: the imitation of owl’s eyes to scare away predators.

It was that image that flashed in Juno’s mind when he looked into the mirror, and it took him a moment to figure out why. The thing in his head was made to look like an eye - it was a good enough copy to fool someone at a glance. But it lacked depth, like it had been painted onto something else. Like a moth’s wing.

“It’s not an eye.”

“Not like your other one, no,” Vespa agrees.

This is the part where Juno should be screaming. There’s something alien in him, attached to him by muscles and blood vessels, and he studies it like he can find his own answers from it. The color is close, but it’s not even as convincing as a glass eye; the cosmetic seems like an afterthought, and the function is anyone’s guess. 

Vespa can tell him it’s not a tumor. It’s not the Curemother Prime attempting to heal him by setting him back; Juno slept, and while he did, he grew another organ.

“Oh good,” Juno breathes while Vespa leans close to attach the bandage. “Would’ve hated to wake up and find out the cure did something weird.”

“You’re fine, you big baby,” Vespa mutters, carefully placing the eyepatch on top (the less Sasha knows about his medical progress, the better). “We’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Are you making _jokes_ right now? Is that supposed to be funny?” And the breathless whispers, the confusion and exhaustion… they give way to sudden, startled laughter. Juno and Vespa are laughing, alone late at night in the medbay with blood on her shirt and a growth in his head, because somehow they’re still here and there aren’t any words to say how that feels.

They laugh until they collapse into each other, tired beyond description.

* * *

Juno’s dreams are strange. He doesn’t know if he sleeps anymore; he always feels awake.

“I don’t actually know what it is,” Juno says, rubbing his eye through the patch. He’s laying on the ground with pieces of machinery spread around him, a faint metallic sound echoing from a short distance away.

“Hm.” Jet doesn’t turn to look at him, or even look up from his repairs. “But you are well?”

“No more headaches.”

“That was not an answer, Juno.”

Juno sighs. He’s well enough - he just wishes he could sleep, which is stupid because he _is_ sleeping, right _now_. That’s why he’s not in the medbay, why he can hear Jet like Jet is actually next to him - all lonely, lucid dreaming. Disorienting lucid dreaming that comes on almost before he knows he’s asleep. 

He tries to think of a better way to explain the workings of his head to a figment of his overworked brain, only to stop when Rita leans over him from the other side of a nest of blankets.

“Your bags got bags, boss.” Juno’s left gaping. “Say something? So I know you’re alright?”

“Rita,” he chokes out at last, and nothing else. He can’t get past the sudden wave of godawful ache - how long has it been now since he’s seen her, really actually seen her? 

“I know I didn’t say what exactly you should say, Mistah Steel, but I was maybe hoping for something a little more enlightenin’ you know?” She stares a little longer, waiting, and smiles a small, familiar smile when it doesn’t get anything else out of him. “Or we could just watch a stream if you’re not feeling up to it. We don’t gotta talk yet.”

Juno tries to tell her that he’s missed her, but the blanket is gone and he’s standing. He feels smooth metal in his hand, a shape that’s as familiar to him now as breathing - a handle, and a guard, and a trigger.

“Well, darling? Let’s see what your aim looks like now.”

There’s a flash of red hair at the corner of his vision, but Juno ignores it in favor of the target in front of him; it’s an easy shot, and it would be insulting if it wasn’t coming from Juno’s own mind. He lifts the blaster, remembers long hours compensating for halved sight, and fires.

It’s a perfect hit.

“Good to know that getting your sight restored hasn’t thrown you off - we’re going to need every advantage we can find to get out of this one.”

“It’s not an eye.” Buddy is standing at the edge of their target-practice room, looking calm and at-ease. Juno rubs at the eyepatch again. “It’s some kind of cheap imitation.”

Buddy raises an eyebrow but doesn’t move. “An interesting choice, for alien technology.”

“Didn’t say it made sense.”

That’s what finally moves Buddy from her spot across the room and closer to him. “You _must_ be unwell - I’ve never heard you accuse something of not making sense without immediately trying to make sense of it. Are you alright, Juno?”

“Just peachy. Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“I don’t know, darling. Perhaps it has something to do with the screaming?” She’s smiling, but there’s something… stretched, in her expression. Stressed, maybe, and Juno feels a stab of guilt in his stomach before he reminds himself that he’s just dreaming. 

“Or you’re a convoluted message from my brain, trying to tell me something else is wrong.” 

Buddy’s smile grows. “Is that really what you think?”

Juno doesn’t know what to think. There’s another possibility, a function he hasn’t pressed out of fear that it might work.

“Take the shot, darling. You won’t get anywhere aiming at the ground.”

Juno rubs the eyepatch and turns to look at Buddy. “Is this my dream or yours?”

Her smile widens. “That’s a better question.”

* * *

The song in his head feels like home. He doesn’t know where it comes from.

Juno hums along in the dark.

* * *

When Juno looks for him, he isn’t hard to find.

Nureyev is standing in front of the Ruby 7. Juno can’t see him, but he can feel him. He can feel the bag in Nureyev’s hand, the plastic weave of the handle digging into his palms with the weight. He can feel the slight sway of Nureyev standing in place, the uncertainty of whether his next step will be forward or back. He can feel the heavy exhaustion in Nureyev’s limbs, the slow blink of his eyes, the way standing in the open unguarded fills him with an anxious need to run. 

Juno can hear him, too. Nureyev’s mind is a _cacophony_ \- the echoes of Juno’s screams are still ringing in his ears, and he fights the compulsion to return to the medbay again, in spite of the robotic guard that’s never not watching, to stand around the corner from entry in a show of desperate futility. He has to leave. He can’t leave, not now, but he’s already on borrowed time. What is he going to do, hide in the vents and walls and underbelly of the ship, circle a locked door, until his time is up and he’s brought more danger down on them all? He’s running out of time and he _has to leave_.

The feeling of it is different, now. Juno rests on the surface of something much deeper, and he doesn’t push himself; he’s treading the water instead of diving, and the strain is not what he remembers from the tomb. Because it’s not a tumor, Juno remembers. It’s an organ, made to fit into his head. He doesn’t have to test his limits to know that he can’t delve into memories anymore. He could put the bag down, though. He could walk Nureyev away from the garage, back somewhere safe, put the thought of leaving out of his head as easily as a kiss on the forehead - 

There’s a thought, louder than the others.

_Do you want to be the reason Juno’s screaming next time, Peter Nureyev?_ _Get in and go, you coward. You’re useless to him_.

_Stop that_ , Juno answers. He does it without thinking, an immediate and unfiltered reaction, pushed directly into Nureyev’s mind. Like hell is Juno gonna stand there and listen to Nureyev treat himself like that. Like hell. And just like that, the floodgates are open. _Don’t do that to yourself, I don’t want you to do that to yourself, I’m okay, I wish you could get through the door too I worried about you they were looking for you and I worried are you okay are you hurt anywhere why do you think you have to leave. I miss you_. _I miss you, Peter Nureyev_.

“Juno?” Juno feels Nureyev’s mouth shape the name out loud, barely a whisper, and the feeling cuts through the deluge of thoughts and feelings that are pouring out of Juno. He holds it back. He holds himself back to make room for them both.

_Do you have to go?_

“I -”

_I’m so tired. I bet you are, too. Could you just… sleep on it, with me?_

“Love, I… I can’t reach you right now.”

_It doesn’t have to be there - I’m here right now. My room’s empty, and you can. You can think some more, about what you want to do_.

“Juno, I wouldn’t… I would never just…”

It doesn’t matter that he can’t get the words out; Juno can hear them in his head. Juno can hear how much he wants to say he would never leave, and how much he doesn’t want to lie. _Can you decide tomorrow? ...please?_

And when Nureyev takes a step back, turns and creeps back into the ship like a silent shadow until he’s reached Juno’s door, Juno knows that it doesn’t matter what the eye-that-isn’t-an-eye can let him do. He won’t do it. If Nureyev decides to leave, Juno won’t hold him here.

Together on the bed, together and alone, Juno and Nureyev sleep.

* * *

“You’re looking at my cards again.”

“I am not looking at your cards.” It comes out as a growl. Vespa is unfazed. “You’re looking at your cards, and sometimes I’m using your eyes.”

“That’s called cheating, Steel.”

“I can’t _cheat_ if I don’t know how the _goddamn game works, Vespa_.”

The announcement that Juno could read minds didn’t surprise Vespa. The announcement that he’d been walking around in dreams didn’t surprise her either, and the potential for bodily control coaxed a raised eyebrow from her but very little in the way of actual commentary. “I’ve been living with you for a while, Steel,” she’d said at last while Juno braced himself for an explosion. “You talk in your sleep, but only since the eye, and this explains more than you know.” And then she’d insisted on testing it.

She’d insisted on testing it by teaching him Rangian street poker, and Juno wasn’t sure this wasn’t her own form of revenge for the hell he’d accidentally been putting her through.

The point of the exercise, as Vespa explained it, was to cheat without being caught. “You’re never gonna beat me at this game,” she’d told a scowling Juno while distributing cards. “Your only hope in hell is to cheat, and if you’re gonna cheat without me finding out, you’d better look like developing that telepathy into a tool instead of a hammer you swing at people.”

“And what’s the point of that,” Juno asked, monotone, staring at his cards and wondering what the card with all the swords meant. He probably didn’t want to know.

“The point is, if you can sneak into someone’s mind without her knowing, maybe you can talk someone into _getting off of our damn ship_.”

They play Rangian street poker until Juno’s sure his other eye is going to fall out. When they aren’t playing poker, Vespa’s poking him to try and contact the crew. When he’s not sending out messages and wondering if they’re actually getting everywhere, Vespa is bothering him about possession, and if he thinks it would work on robots. When they prove, definitively, that robot possession is not a gift Juno has (and set off several alarms in the process), Juno pretends to sleep.

It’s a good concept, in theory. If they had months to work with, they might get somewhere. But Sasha is getting nervous, and they’re running out of time. Dark Matters is at their door already; if they decide to come in, mind-reading won’t cut it.

Juno puts down the cards and tells Vespa he’s too tired for more poker. Juno sleeps, and he dreams.

* * *

Sasha is staring at a body on the ground. 

Juno’s footsteps echo as he approaches. The figure is covered in blood, a lethal blaster shot through his head. His eyes are still open, staring at nothing, and she’s holding a smoking gun. The scene is familiar, in the way a burn on his skin would be familiar, or an empty eye socket; it’s the kind of pain that leaves a permanent mark.

“You got the angle wrong,” he says into the silence of the warehouse, because of course they’re in the warehouse. This is the place where Sasha’s guilt comes to roost, the same as Juno’s in his brother’s bedroom. “Benten’s arms weren’t positioned like that.”

Sasha doesn’t even turn to look at him. “That’s not Benten.”

Juno looks into his own lifeless eyes. “I know.”

“Why are you here, Juno?”

“Why are you?”

The question is soft enough that it doesn’t spread very far, even in the huge space, but it might as well have been a ringing accusation with the way Sasha turns to him. She holds up the gun. “I shot you. I _killed_ you.”

“Not yet.”

“May as well have. That doctor of yours seems to think you have days.”

Juno shrugs, but he doesn’t correct her; Vespa has her reasons. “I might get lucky, who knows? I’m told I’m hard to kill.” Sasha snorts, and things are almost - achingly _almost_ \- normal between them.

Maybe that’s why he just… asks. There’s still some part of him that sees her as a friend. No, not even that - there’s still some part of him that hopes they can find each other. “What did you come looking for, Sasha?”

She stares at the ground, but the body is gone now; the only Juno in the warehouse is the one she’s talking to, and he’s not dead yet. “You haven’t figured it out?”

“The Curemother. That’s why you let Vespa use it - you wanted to see what it would do, because you need it for something. You need it for something before Dark Matters locks it away somewhere.” Sasha doesn’t answer. “Why won’t you let me help you, Sash?”

“You’re not trying to help me,” she snaps. She doesn’t even look angry; she just looks tired, and Juno wonders when they both got so _old_. He feels so far away from who they used to be. “I don’t need you to help me. I’ll figure this out on my own, Juno.” And this - this Juno remembers. Sasha Wire who has to be perfect, Sasha Wire who has to be in control all the time, over every part of her life. 

Juno that wants to be angry and snap back; that’s part of who they used to be, nettling each other until they’d worked themselves up to yelling. It won’t help; they never heard each other when they got like that. And anyway, he knows how to get the answer from her: he just needs to push a little harder, make her give up that desperate, clinging control, reach in and pull the information out from her own mouth. Give up control to - 

It’s quiet in the warehouse. There are no sounds outside to break up the silence between them, and Juno doesn’t know if it’s because Sasha’s dream didn’t bother with filler noise, or if they’re just so far into the building that nothing else can reach them. He looks at the old, rusted machinery, and he doesn’t have the slightest idea what any of it does; but someone, somewhere, assembled it. They looked at blueprints for form, function, and operating procedures to create a device that would fit the given parameters and do the work efficiently and effectively.

Like an eye, shaped and painted for form, crafted for inhuman function, and operated like a clever bit of programming. All of the blueprints are there.

Juno steps back from Sasha. She still isn’t looking at him; she’s looking with intent for a body and a bloodstain that aren’t there, and as long as she’s sure she’ll find it, she won’t see him. He’ll have his answers if and when she decides to share them. Until then…

“If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

And Juno wakes up.

* * *

It’s so quiet in the medbay. Vespa is writing something at the desk, but slowly. Her head is balanced on her hand, and Juno knows she’s seconds away from falling asleep right there.

“Thank you,” he whispers. He’s not sure she hears.

But the good thing about waking up is that he’ll have a chance to say it again.

* * *

Juno sings, in his head. It’s a song he’s heard before, and it slips out around his lips and under his breath without his notice. He doesn’t notice much; he tries to focus on the Curemother’s song, hiding it under his own accompaniment. 

Juno hums.

Outside of himself, a chain reaction of events is set into motion.

It’s a matter of moments before Dark Matters tracking technology notices the absence of noise from the Curemother. Director W slams open the door of the medbay to find a sleeping Juno Steel and a distracted Vespa Ilkay. The calm and collected facade has broken; she is fury given form as she questions Vespa, only stopped when a guard discovers the Ruby 7 missing. She pauses in the doorway long enough to stare at Juno and promises, in what sounds like a threat, that they haven’t seen the last of each other. She leaves the ward, and the Carte Blanche, to give chase.

Above them, on the cover of an air vent, the screw on the upper left corner is not securely fastened.

Juno hums.

Somewhere else and hours ago, a thief leans out of a vehicle and plants a chip on the side of a Dark Matters ship. There may or may not be a bag of stolen items on the seat next to him, but whether he’s going forward or back, he is alone. He leaves before the guards see him.

Juno hums.

The robots on the Carte Blanche and a stunning amount of technology on the ship next to it experience a small malfunction. It’s hardly noticeable on the Dark Matters ship; on the Carte Blanche, marvels of technology are sent crashing to the floor, inert and useless, as a marvel of technological destruction slides a hidden handheld computer back up her sleeve.

Juno sings - and then he stops, jolted from his thoughts by someone shaking his shoulder. “Time to go, Steel,” Vespa mutters, and helps him out of bed. He’s wobbly on his feet, but she doesn’t rush him as they make their uncertain getaway. She holds his hand while they walk.

They round the corner, and finally there are no more walls. There’s Rita, tackling into him like a tiny hurricane, and Jet lifting him bodily from the ground to carry him the rest of the way to the couch, and Buddy asking him how he feels from where she’s wrapped around Vespa. And Juno is so tired, and so heavy, and so cared for; it’s in all of their thoughts as Juno skips across them by habit.

And it was in Peter Nureyev’s eyes when he found a way to the medbay, holding Juno’s face and asking him how he felt, what he could do to help, kissing him on the forehead. The care had been so much and so present that Juno didn’t need to hear it in his mind to know it was sincere. But he wouldn’t have needed to anyway.

_Do you trust me_ , Juno had asked out loud.

_With anything. With everything, Juno_.

_If I ask you to go… will you come back?_

Nureyev was quiet. _If I ask that you’re still here for me to come back to_ , he answered quietly, _will you be?_

They don’t answer. They aren’t looking for promises, really; it’s just a different way of saying goodbye, for however long it lasts this time.

Laying on the couch, watching his family move around the room to make their escape, Juno makes the conscious and repeated effort to trust. He trusts them, he trusts himself, he trusts Peter Nureyev. He trusts that there are better days ahead, and that he’ll be there to see them.

Juno puts that trust into practice, and he falls asleep.


End file.
